The topic I investigated is the difference between music by musicians with perfect pitch (PP) vs relative pitch (RP). In a lot of musical scenes, perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) is adored like it is some kind of godsend. On one hand, perfect pitch only means you can identify pitches quickly, which would not necessarily make you a better musician. On the other hand, using it as a tool to learn music theory faster and easily identifying pitches when playing in some kind of ensemble could really make someone a better (subjectively, of course) musician. Listening to music is not the same as playing music and identifying music is not the same either. It is important to note that I use the word relative pitch here as any non-absolute pitch hearing, since everyone seems to have some kind of natural understanding of relative pitches (even the untrained ear can usually distinguish the octave from the minor second for example). This is not necessarily the general use of the term relative pitch, but it is a way for me not to have to distinguish between all identified types of non-perfect pitch hearing.
It’s not hard to identify that my natural comparison groups consists of artists (PP artists vs RP artists). However, unbiased sampling of these artists is not a simple ordeal. Just choosing some random PP and RP artists would easily fall to biases, so I have put some thought and consideration into sampling the artists. Keeping differences that are due to genre out of the comparison was one of the biggest challenges for researching this corpus. For this reason, I have decided to compare specific artists with PP to artists with RP who fall into the same genre of music at approximately the same time period and with a similar caliber. In the table next to this text, you can find which PP artist I paired up with which RP artist. I used the “This is” playlists on spotify to sample tracks for each artist, and randomly deleted the difference between the number of songs for the PP and RP artists, to make sure the genre proportions were the same for each playlist as well as the sample size. I will not be able to provide a thorough conclusion due to limits in resources, but it will hopefully provide some insight into the differences between musicians with PP and those without.
I will also do some more in-depth analyses of specific tracks. I will particularly look at tracks from Jimi Hendrix and Jacob Collier, both artists that are considered to be one of a kind musical geniuses that have/had PP.
| Genre | PP artist | RP artist | Number of tracks per playlist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rock | Jimi Hendrix | Cream | 40 |
| Classical | W.A. Mozart | FJ Haydn | 62 |
| Pop | Charlie Puth | Nick Jonas | 45 |
| Jazz | Oscar Peterson | Red Garland | 49 |
n = 196 N = 392
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As you can see in Adam Neely’s video, the key of Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix (who has PP and is in the PP playlist), has a key that is somewhat ambiguous. To look at the ambiguity, one can look at a keygram, which shows all keys and can basically show which key is more likely than another key. In the next tab we’ll take a look at what happens.
I have tried to make the tempogram work but so far my laptop has refused to do the amount of work that is necessary for a tempogram, which is why I have settled for a novelty function for now. I haven’t spent much time on anything else, so the portfolio really hasn’t improved very much. I will probably do most of the work on the weekend before the deadline of the portfolio after all of my exams.
I haven’t been able to do much yet, but at least here is a chord-o-gram of a song by Charlie Puth who has PP.
In the pitch graph, you can see very clear boxes, especially around the 200-300 mark. These indicate novelty. The 200-300 mark is the bridge, which is why it is the clearest box (since bridges are, generally, melodically very different from the verse and chorus). You can also see some diagonal lines around the 75-200 mark, which indicate repetition. In the timbre graph however, you do not see these diagonal lines, apart from the one through the middle that indicates that we’re graphing the same song against itself. This means that there seems to be no or very little repetition within timbre. However, since the whole timbre matrix is almost completely blue, this indicates that there is very little timbral change.
To look at the emotional differences in the PP and the RP playlist, the variables of valence, energy, mode and tempo, as measured by spotify, were used. High valence is considered as emotionally positive, whereas low valence is considerd as emotionally negative. T-tests were used to find any differences in means. Although the mode is categorical, it was analyzed as a continuous variable for ease, since this does not effect the p-value due to the t-test being a general linear model. With an alpha level of 0.05 none were significant, although valence was very close to being significant.
Two-sided t-tests
| Variable | PP Mean | RP Mean | P-value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tempo | 112.9424091 | 113.3670357 | 0.8866453 |
| Energy | 0.3720677 | 0.3424691 | 0.2750405 |
| Valence | 0.4379536 | 0.3908816 | 0.0563126 |
| Mode | 0.6363636 | 0.622449 | 0.7699918 |
From this one can conclude that there probably aren’t any major differences in the musical emotional expression between people with PP and people with RP.